The Form
Baum's Policeman Bluejay partakes of a deep tradition in literature and storytelling, folklore and myth, which employs the animal world, especially birds and bees, as metaphor for the human condition. Chaucer's The Parliament of Fowls is probably the best-known work in this vein, though various others can be cited, most commonly involving birds, and in Indian, Persian, and Arabic literature as well as Western. The trope re-appears in twentieth-century poetry, and in the early twenty-first it is still used to reach and teach young children.
In regard to bees, John Day's play The Parliament of Bees is arguably the most famous of a number of related works. (One major distinction applies: writers like Chaucer and Day were primarily interested in commenting on human society, and used their animal metaphors as means to that end. In Baum's book, the animals and their welfare are the central consideration.)
More generally, talking animals and human/animal transformation are virtually universal in world folklore. Baum's animal fable participates in this ancient tradition.
Read more about this topic: Policeman Bluejay
Famous quotes containing the word form:
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Whoever denies that he possesses vanity generally possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes in its presence, so as not to have to look down upon himself.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)